


All Ways Lead To The Force

by Omnicat



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Gen, Humor, Nerd Culture, Post-Canon, Redeemed Ben Solo, Rey Nobody, There's No Such Thing As An Inappropriate Use Of The Force
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-03
Updated: 2019-04-05
Packaged: 2020-01-01 09:01:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18332867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omnicat/pseuds/Omnicat
Summary: Rey and Ben discover Force conventions and Force-user cosplayers. Turns out they've been doing this Force thing all wrong, according to the experts!





	1. Attack of the Noobs

"Some of these people, I swear," the Pantoran woman sitting beside her drawled conversationally. "They think that just because they bear a passing resemblance to a famous Force-user, they don’t have to put any extra effort into looking the part."

Rey swallowed thickly, her drink burning on the way down.

"Not you, cutie, you’re the very picture of a dashing Last Jedi," the Pantoran assured her with a wink. Rey blushed, glad to know all that practice she and Ben had put into muddling their presence with the Force continued to have the desired effect. "I mean the likes of _that_ guy over there."

Rey followed her contemptuously pointed finger to find who else but Ben. He was just barely holding onto his self-restraint in conversation with a hyperactive young Rodian swathed in black robes and adorned with spikes in the most unlikely places. Ben looked like someone had pulled his face into a reluctant approximation of a smile and nailed it in place that way. And – okay, he looked nothing like a Jedi or Darksider today, Sith or otherwise. Rey didn’t think she’d dressed very Force-y herself, but apparently tan simply evoked associations that red and brown didn’t. Ben’s tunic certainly was the brightest piece of clothing in the room, dominated as it was by blacks and beiges.

Rey replied with the only thing that seemed appropriate: an eloquent "Hm."

The thing was, they hadn’t thought they’d need to dress ‘Force-y’. The holo-ad had said:

_All Ways Lead To The Force Club_

_Meet and mingle with like-minded souls (or singles!) with an interest in the Force. From historical to modern to fictional, from the practical to the philosophical to the scientific, from collectors to creators, and from the Light Side to the Dark, we welcome enthusiasts of every aspect of the Force. No Force-sensitivity is required to join, but we offer Midichlorian-count tests from genuine old Republic stock, lightsaber combat courses and workshops for building your own, fully functional battery-run saber replicas, tips to pull off mind tricks with or without the Force, and many other activities! Food and drink available at venue. All that and music too? You bet!_

_The All Ways Lead To The Force Club holds weekly hour-long meetings (schedule for the next several months [HERE], and also organizes larger events on a regular basis. Download our next full-weekend event’s schedule [HERE]._

_(No illegal activities or wares allowed on Club premises, nor weapons except lightsabers. Violent or inappropriate behavior will not be tolerated. Even the Dark Side is no excuse, Force Friends! New Republic ID will be required to purchase alcohol or spice, and to enter into age-restricted panels or other activities.)_

"Not quite like the temple your uncle ran, I take it?" Rey had remarked with no small amount of amusement.

"Not in the slightest." Ben hadn’t been able to tear his eyes away. "I want in."

Nowhere, however, had it said ‘dress-up party’.

"And that lightsaber," the Pantoran’s Chandra-Fan friend scoffed. "Did he just weld together the first handful of junk he could find?"

The Pantoran leaned into Rey conspiratorially. "It looks like padawan’s first fan-design too. It’s so embarrassing when newbies think they can just come up with their own wildly deviating versions of things with no regard for their thousands of years of history, don’t you think?"

 _It dates back thousands of years to the Great Scourge of Malachor, actually,_ came Ben’s oft-voiced retort, as immediately and accurately as if the club members had pressed a replay button in Rey’s brain. It took everything within Rey’s power to keep her expression neutral.

"Now, _my_ lightsaber, on the other hand, is an exact replica of Grand Master Yoda’s," the Chandra-Fan said, and proudly produced the object in question from his belt.

"An excellent choice, though not everybody has to go _that_ far," his Pantoran friend said. "Yours looks like a Skywalker derivative. Right?"

Rey hid her face in her cup. "Yeah, sort of."

The Pantoran got her own battery-powered lightsaber out, but then the pair’s comms beeped and the Chandra-Fan leapt to his feet, cutting his illusion of height granted by the tall bar stool he’d sat on in half.

"The panel’s starting! Sorry, we gotta go."

"Hey, you wanna come?" the Pantoran asked Rey. "Our friend is saving us spots right at the front of the line. Nobody would notice if we snuck in an extra person."

"Oh, no thanks, I’m, uh, waiting for someone."

"Well, if you change your mind, you know where I’ll be for the next hour," she said, brushing her fingers along Rey’s on the countertop as she stood. "See you around."

"Yeah," Rey said. "Sure. See ya."

She waited until the pair had left the bar, downed the rest of her drink in one go, and went to save Ben from his new friend.

"Hey, you coming?" she said brightly, unceremoniously wrapping herself around his elbow. "The panel’s about to start."

"Yes!" Ben exclaimed, now with an apologetic expression even freakier than the smile he’d sported earlier. Luckily, Rodians often had as much trouble reading human faces as humans had trouble with Rodian faces. "I have to go. My apologies. I’ll need that back now."

The eager young Rodian was holding Ben’s lightsaber in a death grip with his suction-cupped fingers. He kept babbling in Rodian, which Ben understood but Rey hadn’t yet learned, for a while longer, and wouldn’t let Ben or the lightsaber go until he’d gotten Rey to take a holopicture of him and Ben holding the lit saber between them.

When they finally walked away, Ben whispered, a little shell-shocked: "I’m being recognized. By – _fans_. Not even the usual Empire and First Order revival crowd, but... this kid, he was so impressed by how Dark I’d gotten and how balanced I am now. He never even mentioned the politics behind it."

"Aww." Rey couldn’t help but grin. "Look at you, having admirers and setting good examples for the younglings."

But Ben seemed a little too overwhelmed to appreciate it yet. "He told me his whole life story. He’s come up with this whole philosophy based around what he knows of me. ...he’ll probably come back with all his friends."

" _I’m_ getting propositioned, if it makes you feel any better," Rey said cheerfully.

"No? I think I’ve done enough sharing for one weekend," he said, shooting her a sharp look of alarm and surreptitiously rubbing his lightsaber on his tunic, as if to wipe off the overly avid interest. Rey could only imagine how the boy had gotten it out of his hands in the first place.

"Oh, don’t worry. She was very pretty, but I doubt she would’ve wanted to share me with you either. She thought your approach to the Force was insultingly half-arsed."

_"Excuse me?"_

Rey laughed wholeheartedly. "I know! I could barely keep a straight face."

They walked, gradually leaving the ruckus of the bar and the event’s central halls behind them.

"This place isn’t anything like I was expecting," Ben murmured a while later.

"What were you expecting?"

"I’m not sure. Probably something more like my uncle’s temple after all. Where the Force was all sacred serenity and grave responsibility and everything about it a test of my character. Not... _this_." He waved his arm in the general direction of a pair of lovebirds feeding each other pieces of fruit. They were floating them into each other’s mouths with ‘the Force’, i.e. tiny magna-grav pincer droids controlled via motion-sensitive gloves. "Simultaneously the greatest thing they’ve ever seen and as normal as anything else in the world. Something you can turn into _entertainment_ when you’re not doing anything else with it."

"Hm." Rey considered that. "Now that you mention it, that’s always how _I_ saw it. Once the initial shock wore off, that is. Sure, I only knew the Force from stories of noble heroes and great, galaxy-shaking destinies before I found it in myself, but when I did, it was just... me. The world. Stuff. Breathtaking and world-changing, but so were forests and lakes and all the rest of everything Jakku didn’t have. Does that sound weird?"

Ben’s hand slipped into hers, and squeezed it. "No. That sounds wonderful."

"Good, because what _I’ve_ always thought was weird was that pained face you used to make when I use the Force to fetch myself a snack without having to get up off the couch."

He answered her smirk with a faint smile.

"I always felt like I’d failed the test before I’d ever arrived at the temple. Before I met you, I thought of the Force as something that would try to drown me all my life unless I drowned it first. And until we came here... well, let’s just say I wish I could’ve seen it this way sooner myself. I’m glad you never experienced it any other way."

"So you’re glad we came after all?" she goaded. "Even with the fans?"

"Yes, even with the fans. You?"

"I’m having the time of my life." Rey returned his earlier squeeze with one of her own and grinned. "Let’s go get our Midichlorian counts tested and pretend to be so surprised by the results we spontaneously make things float."

Now it was Ben’s turn to laugh. It was a rare thing only she ever seemed to accomplish in him, and it never failed to fill Rey with a warm swell of triumph.

"Yes, let’s."


	2. Revenge of the Noobs

The next day of the event, Rey wore blue. No reason, just because.

"Okay?" Ben said, not sure why she would specify that. Before he could ask, though, she dragged him off the Falcon to have breakfast in the city before they returned to the All Ways Lead To The Force Club’s event venue.

They joined in for the ligthsaber combat course that day (inconspicuous enough; there were plenty of swordfighters of all stripes in the galaxy) and sat in on a few lectures, one on the history of the ancient roots of the Jedi and Sith orders (by a professional researcher, leaving both Rey and Ben on the edge of their seats) and one on post-Imperial Force-related groups, practices and philosophies (which Rey spent making notes and Ben twitching with the effort of not yelling corrections and objections whenever one he’d associated with was discussed). Then they took a walk around the venue to get the blood flowing again and went looking for lunch.

The in-house cantina was packed. It may or may not have taken a bit of Force-tweaking to get them seats. While Rey had a lifetime of practice elbowing her way through masses of bodies significantly bigger and heavier than herself, Ben had learned to smooth-force his way through crowds long before he’d learned to blunt-Force everybody who got his way into the nearest wall. Out of the two of them, he would probably be the one drawing less attention to himself. And after several minutes of arguing this purely for the sake of arguing, Rey threw her hands up into the air and said: "Fine, _you_ refill our drinks then, Your Subtleness."

He leaned over their table to peck the tip of her nose. "I still love it when you rathtar-in-a-china-shop your way through things, though."

Smirking, Rey stuffed her face with fried purple Neimoidian tuber sticks and mumbled something unintelligible. Ben took that to mean ‘I love you too’ and maneuvered his way into the crowd.

Of course, more troublesome than the sheer number of people was the subset of those people who wouldn’t return the courtesy of getting out of someone else’s way.

"Excuse me," he said to a beautiful Pantoran woman and a Chandra-Fan having a conversation right in front of the juice dispenser.

"– discovered Force-sensitives before, sure, but she said these were the highest Midichlorian scores the Club’s ever seen, by a landslide," the Pantoran was saying.

"People are saying they looked a lot like Rey of Jakku and Kylo Ren, though. Like, _a lot_ ," the Chandra-Fan replied.

"Ben Solo," Ben corrected automatically, under his breath, mouth twitching.

To back away or not to back away? Pushing his luck with the Force-guided face-blindness a little too far and being recognized wouldn’t be the end of the world, but it tended to create such a fuss. He’d promised Rey _less_ fuss.

"Oh please, we would’ve noticed by now if we had _Rey and Kylo Ren_ walking around in here."

" _Ben Solo_ ," Ben repeated, louder now.

(Pushing his luck it was.)

The Chandra-Fan looked over, looked Ben over, and said: "Pro-tip, noob: don’t lightname Darksiders."

Then he demonstratively turned his back on Ben. Ben’s mouth opened on its own accord. No words suitable to speak presented itself to go along with the urge to. The Pantoran looked over her shoulder, snorted out a laugh, and continued her conversation.

"Anyway, we _have_ to find out if they’re still here. There’s always so many new people at these weekends. The guys at the testing booth didn’t recognize them, they’re probably first-timers who got the surprise of a lifetime. Think of everything we could teach them!"

Okay then. Ben had to wonder what his face was doing just then.

He raised his voice. "Excuse me, I’d like to get a refill. From that machine you’re blocking."

They ignored him, the Chandra-Fan laughing and jumping up and down with excitement. "You’re right, no way would they have left after that revelation! They’re probably wandering around looking for any and all information they can find about their new selves!"

"Right?!"

The duo devolved into a rapid-fire exchange of ideas for what to bring him and Rey up to speed on when they found them. Things they’d barely even bothered to discuss before doing away with them (‘proper attire’, reproducing ritual and tradition to perfection, religiously memorizing every word the long-dead Jedi had ever said no matter how fundamentally they disagreed, or how contradictory to everything the next long-dead Jedi over had ever said), things they already knew (how to build your own lightsaber? hahahahaha, sob), things the pair was predictably dead wrong about (the Force worked in a sometimes mind-boggling number of ways, but no, not like _that_. also, nobody _needed_ Force-training. Ben knew more Force-sensitive people who’d turned out fine without it than with), and things Ben had never heard of and wasn’t sure he wanted to know (what contests? who’s fighting holonet wars why now? what did word counts have to do with anything?).

" _Excuse_ me?"

Nothing.

Well, fine.

"Okay, no problem," Ben said, letting go of Rey’s empty cup. "No sudden movements _now_."

He floated the cup between the Pantoran and the Chandra-Fan, toward the juice dispenser. Nothing happened. The pair kept chattering on about their plans to welcome the extraordinary ‘newbies’ into the fold. Using the Force, Ben set the cup in the depression in the dispenser, pushed the lever to release the juice, and brought the full cup back into his hand.

That’s when the Pantoran’s brow creased. And the Chandra-Fan’s words trailed off into a questioning noise, followed by a startled squeak. And a silence with a distinct brains-screeching-to-a-halt quality followed. As one, they looked respectively down and up at each other. Looked at the cup. Looked at Ben.

Letting the Force-made privacy field fall, Ben plucked the cup from the air.

The duo jumped back with matching shrieks, blue limbs flailing and fur puffing everywhere on either side of him.

"No, please, don’t let me interrupt. I’ve got this," he said mildly.

With languid movements of the hand holding his own, still-empty cup, he tilted the Pantoran upright from where he’d frozen her fall, and collected the handful of brightly-wrapped, candied bugs the Chandra-Fan had been holding. Then he took a step forward, set down the cup by hand, and filled it with an ordinary press of his finger.

"There. No problem," he said, backing away with his prize. "Have a nice day."

The Pantoran and the Chandra-Fan spluttered after him like fish on the dry.

When he returned to their table, Rey had her face hidden behind the salad bowl and her shoulders were shaking with wheezily-repressed laughter.

"See?" Ben said, smiling into his juice. "No fuss at all."

Rey lost it so completely there was no way the Pantoran and the Chandra-Fan didn’t hear it.


End file.
